Libya hearing to put Kerry in spotlight

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Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., speaks to reporters following a closed-door briefing on the investigation of the deadly Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON — Insight into how the next secretary of state might reshape US diplomacy could come Thursday, when Senator John F. Kerry, widely expected to win the post, chairs a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the fatal security failings at the US consulate in Libya.

The hearing on the terrorist attack in Benghazi comes on the heels of a scathing new report outlining “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies.”

A classified annex to the report raises the prospect of shuttering some US diplomatic outposts deemed too dangerous for small teams of Foreign Service officers, including in Egypt, a senior State Department official familiar with the findings told the Globe.

The Benghazi report led to the resignations Wednesday of three top State Department officials, including two responsible for security.

The report made 29 recommendations that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Congress she would order adopted before she steps down, as planned, in January.

The oversight hearing, in which Undersecretary of State William J. Burns will be one of the witnesses, has the makings of highly unusual Washington theater. Kerry, the leading contender for secretary of state, will be in the position of grilling the number-two diplomat, who might be working for him in a few months.

Kerry will be leading a committee seeking answers to the troubling circumstances of the Libya attack.

“We ask our diplomats and development personnel to operate in some of the most dangerous places on the planet,” Kerry said in a statement Wednesday. “We owe it to them, and we owe it to the memory of Ambassador Chris Stevens and his three fellow Americans who lost their lives in Benghazi to get past the politics and focus on the substance of what happened and what it tells us about diplomatic security going forward.”

Still, the report by the State Department Accountability Review Board, which was chaired by Ambassador Thomas Pickering and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, was seen by some Republicans as vindication of their assertions that the deaths could have been prevented if State Department officials had heeded the calls for additional security at the remote diplomatic outpost.

The Benghazi attack — and a nearly simultaneous one against the US embassy in Cairo, that did not result in any injuries — came at the height of a heated presidential campaign. It quickly became fodder for accusations that Obama had mishandled — and initially mischaracterized as the work of an impromptu mob — the attack by a well-armed group of Islamic militants.

“The failure of leadership is unacceptable,” Representative Tom Rooney, a Florida Republican and member of both the House Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said in response to the findings. “We need stronger leadership at the State Department, we need the administration to heed warnings from the intelligence community, and we need significantly better security at our diplomatic posts around the world.”

Among the report’s recommendations:

■ Strengthen security at foreign posts, including increasing the security budget to $2.2 billion by 2015;

■ Move multiple US diplomatic facilities, such as embassies and smaller consulates in the same city, into a single secure location.

But one of the biggest questions the report raised was how to strike the right balance between the need to spread America’s message and aid to foreign populations and secure the safety of diplomatic personnel, especially in the most dangerous locations.

In the decade since 2001, American diplomats have been pushed farther and farther out from behind the high blast walls of fortresslike US embassies in hot spots ranging from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Yemen and Africa.

The expanded role has included serving on small “provincial reconstruction teams” in remote corners of Afghanistan, overseeing development projects and largely cut off from major diplomatic installations or security.

“Expeditionary diplomacy has been a big part of American diplomacy since 2001,” said Nicholas Kralev, author of “America’s Other Army,” which details the role of the Foreign Service in the 21st century and is based on more than 50 visits to US diplomatic posts and hundreds of interviews. “Not just in war zones, but also other dangerous places like Pakistan and in Africa.”

For example, in countries like Sudan, where there have been several attacks on the US embassy in Khartoum, the risks have become far greater when foreign service officers seek to interact with the local population. That has historically been a primary focus of foreign diplomatic missions.

The State Department report said the Benghzai attack by Islamic militants highlighted the growing danger such a posture presents.

“The Benghazi attacks took place against a backdrop of significantly increased demands on US diplomats to be present in the world’s most dangerous places to advance American interests and connect with populations beyond capitals, and beyond host governments’ reach,” the report said.

That has placed them in much greater danger from what the authors called a “growing, diffuse range of terrorist and hostile actors.” The report said this “poses an additional challenge to American security officers, diplomats, development professionals, and decision-makers seeking to mitigate risk and remain active in high-threat environments without resorting to an unacceptable total fortress and stay-at-home approach to US diplomacy.”

The need to strike that balance has been raised before, including in an internal State Department review in 2010.

“It seems they never found that balance,” said Kralev, who believes the Benghazi attack also highlights the need for better training across the Foreign Service, where he said personnel are often “thrown into the deep end and told to learn how to swim.”

Kerry, who as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee has traveled to many of the same regions, has also expressed concerns about the security of such outposts.

In February 2011 his committee released a report warning that diplomats could be in danger if more was not done to protect them.

“With so much uncertainty, we’ve got to make sure we strike the proper balance between the scope of the mission and the available resources,” Kerry said at the time.

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